Mindfulness helps you go home to the present. And every time you go there and recognize a condition of happiness that you have, happiness comes.

Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make your peace with that and all will be well.

Our defilements are like tame tigers. If you feed them, they're tame. If you stop feeding them, they'll eat you up.

The nature of the mind is like the sky, and our thoughts, emotions, and experiences are like clouds passing through it.

Few among men are they who cross to the further shore. The others merely run up and down the bank on this side.

Dependent origination is not a theory about the origin of the world but a teaching that shows how suffering originates in dependence on our own mental processes.

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

The more you are motivated by love, the more fearless and free your actions will be.

Zen proposes its solution by directly appealing to facts of personal experience and not to book-knowledge.

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.

Knowledge must be stabilized by meditation. Without meditation, knowledge is like a child in battle.

The path of insight is a path of discovery, not a path of creation. We are discovering what is already there.

Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others.

The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass.

Our emotions are like waves in the ocean. We can't stop the waves, but we can learn to surf.

The practice of vipassana is the study of the self. When you study physical and mental phenomena, you are studying the truth about yourself.

When you find your place where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point.

Zazen is not step-by-step meditation. Rather it is simply the easy and pleasant practice of a Buddha, the realization of the Buddha's Wisdom.

The idea of Zen is to catch life as it flows. There is nothing extraordinary or mysterious about Zen. I raise my hand; I take a book from the other side of the desk; I hear the boys playing ball outside my window; I see the clouds blown away beyond the neighboring wood: all these I do in Zen.

Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.

The mind of the past is ungraspable; the mind of the future is ungraspable; the mind of the present is ungraspable.

Nothing is permanent. Everything is subject to change. Being is always becoming.

When you note pain, you should not dwell on the thought, "I feel pain." Simply recognize the presence of pain.

Better to have one moment of genuine meditation than to perform religious activities for a thousand years.

The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.

Sensations are not your enemy. They are your teacher. Through observing them, you understand the truth of existence.

We should find perfect existence through imperfect existence.

Be happy at the moment, that's enough. Each moment is all we need, not more.

Compassion is not something we develop. It arises naturally as we see the truth of what is.

The Buddha's teaching is not a philosophy or a religion; it is a method of practice.

The mind has first to be attuned to the Unconscious.

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.